


We Met For the First Time Again Last Night

by The_Exile



Category: Dark Savior
Genre: AU (sort-of), F/M, Parallel 6 is totally real, Speculation, Spoilers, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 13:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He couldn't quite remember the details, but he somehow knew that he had seen that girl before... Garian has met Kay for the first time exactly five times. They weren't necessarily in the right order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Moment Too Late

Garian saw her grip loosen from the rim of the glass vat, then she disappeared over the edge and he never saw her in the flesh again. He heard her scream, though, and he remembered the sudden change in her expression, a seed of creeping uncertainty, dissolving into terror at her own immanent mortality, where before she had only looked at him with fanatical hatred and revulsion in her eyes, an ugly expression on such a beautiful face. She had begun to have doubts at the last second. She might even have been reaching for his hand, ready to accept his offer of help, but not in time before her strength gave out and she fell to her death in front of his eyes. 

It was such a stupid, pointless waste of life. The only reason she hated him enough to die rather than accept his help was something entirely out of his control; because they were from nations with a history of conflict, and they were both directly employed by their respective Governments. If he had the time, he could have made her understand that he was on a mission to recapture a highly dangerous criminal, that it was nothing to do with politics; that he had captured the criminal once and was escorting them to the prison island as an extra precaution, without having been ordered to, and so it was technically a personal mission; that he hadn't even been hired by the Agency, and he might even be disciplined for not requesting permission first. He could have convinced her that he had no reason to betray her, that he wouldn't have done so even if he had been ordered to by the Agency, unless he found out she was a serial killer or something, because he was a human being, not a trained attack dog like she seemed to think everyone from his country was.

He might have said all these things, if he'd had the time. If he had been in the attic just a few seconds earlier himself, he might have gotten to her in time, talked her into accepting his hand in time, pulled her back over the brink in time... If he could only stop being late for everything...

A second hanging on too long and you fall. A second too late to talk to a girl and she moves on. A second late to the Captain's Cabin and you find yourself stuck on a prison escort ship with no Captain, no piloting controls and no prisoners left to escort, only escaped prisoners and dead prisoners. It was amazing how much trouble it could get you into by being even a second late. The problem with being late is that once you're late, you don't stop being late. You're late for the next thing, and then the next, and before you know it, you've let your entire life pass by because you spent it repeatedly falling off the funnel of a boat because your retarded pet bird told you it was a shortcut.

"If I could only have another life," she had told him over a holographic transmission she had hidden for him inside the petals of a faded blue rose. He had even been able to talk to her through the hologram. He hadn't realised how technologically advanced Lavian was compared to Rajeen; all he had was a messenger pigeon that kept grabbing him by the hair and couldn't shut up for five minutes at a time. The hologram had been breaking up into static a lot, though, both the image and the sound increasingly distorted. He hadn't known how much of it was technical problems, either due to the distance or something blocking the signal, and how much was the actual damage being done to the person on the other end. 

She had survived the fall, that much he knew. Anything else was hard to tell; he didn't know what happened to people when they fell into a vat of radioactive goo in an insane prison warden's experimental laboratory. It sounded laughable, like the plot of a B-movie. 'Night of the Zombie Chain Gang'. Things like that often weren't as funny when they really happened to you, or to someone you loved. 

She had survived the fall, but every time she contacted him, she sounded more desperate, her voice weaker and more laboured, as though it was painful for her to speak. She looked in more pain, too; she had been walking around, trying to get a signal, trying to contact her employers to request backup, then she gave up on her Government, who weren't coming for her, started talking to him, started begging him for help, and she was crouched down, as if she was being crushed under a great pressure all around her. Then her image was breaking into static and disappearing from the legs up, as if she was dissolving, or maybe something was eating her. Her words sounded more as though she was giving up, even on Garian. Giving up because it was already too late.

If only they could live another life. Just one last chance. If some hand could turn back the clock to the last time he hadn't screwed up his life. Maybe back to the time he was running for the Captain's Cabin, so he could get a damn move-on. Or maybe he shouldn't have jumped on the stupid boat in the first place. He wouldn't have met the girl, of course, but at least he wouldn't care. He wouldn't know about her, he couldn't get her killed, he wouldn't have her death on his conscience, he wouldn't dream about her every day for the rest of his life, over and over again. He didn't know what kind of life he would have lived - there was no way he could know, he realised, as even a minor change, a couple of seconds here and there, could have a huge effect on his life. He couldn't predict the future and he couldn't be sure that a different future would be any better than the life he lived right now. 

All that he knew was that, if he tried to sleep tonight, he would be able to do nothing but rehearse the day that it had happened, waking up back on that boat, finding the first Blue Rose pressed inside his journal, hearing the alarm, running to the Captain's Cabin...


	2. It Wasn't Exactly The Perfect First Date

Duran was wrong. 

Not that Garian would ever take romantic advice from a skeletal horseman who was guarding the door of a prison he was trying to break out of. He just thought it deserved special mention, given their circumstances: so far, this hadn't been his idea of a perfect date. Mostly it was the first impression that went wrong. A good first impression is the most important part of a date; every guy knows that.

The first time they had met, he had only seen her for a couple of seconds before she ran away on him. The minute he saw her, Jack had spoken too loud, she turned around, saw them and literally disappeared. She looked startled at seeing anyone else on the rafters in the attic, looking down at the room below. She clearly hadn't wanted to be spotted any more than he had. A bounty hunter randomly wandering around a prison looked suspicious; a beautiful woman doing the same thing, one who was able to disappear into thin air without a trace that they had ever existed, made even less sense. What with all the other suspicious things happening on this island so far - the unlicensed mining operations, bizarre medical experiments, prison cruelty and stolen national treasures - Garian had a lot of questions to ask her but he hadn't been given any time. He had accidentally triggered a trap that pitched him straight off the side of the walkway. If Jack hadn't grabbed him by the hair and hauled him to safety, he would have fallen to his death. 

As it was, he had only been captured by the guards and thrown into a torture chamber. The girl was there too. She must have been captured a few seconds before he had. She must have run off somewhere after being distracted from her mission by his sudden appearance, then took a wrong turning and been spotted by the guards; not that different from his own story. 

His date was now officially a complete mess. First they mutually ruin each other's missions, then they get thrown into a torture chamber and he has to fight his way out of a prison complex with her still too weak from her interrogation to stand up, never mind fend for herself. She was still strapped to a modified electric chair for most of the escape. She was tied too tightly for him to break her out without using his sword to cut the straps and running the risk of hurting her. He had to balance the chair on his head while he ran. There had been times when he had to make difficult and potentially lethal jumps, sneak past deadly traps, even fight the occasional mass murderer, all while keeping hold of that goddamn chair with a girl tied to it. And what had she done through most of this? Hurled racial abuse at him. It couldn't have been comfortable for her but he couldn't really have done anything to make it any better and she didn't have to take it out on him when he was risking his life to save hers without any hope of payment. And Jack didn't have to side with her every single time.

Then she suddenly broke the straps and jumped out of the chair in five seconds flat. He was left wondering if she had been able to do that all along. But at least they had been given a chance to get to know each other. Garian knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was in love with the mysterious ninja woman, Kay. Even though every single meeting between them so far had been a disaster, he still loved her. He hoped she had some kind of feelings towards him, that he hadn't screwed things up between them entirely. She seemed to be interested in him; after all, she was capable of disappearing from view in an instant, yet she kept coming back to him so they could cause each other more problems.

Everything he tried to do on the island, she turned out to be involved in. She had told him where to find the Diary of Wouda and helped him solve the mystery of the experiments and the Bilanium mines. She got herself captured - twice - trying to help him on the mission that they both happened to working on at the same time for different reasons. It sounded like a cliche, but it was as if their paths were always meant to cross; as if the threads of their destinies in the tapestry of fate were already tied together in one big tangled mess. 

Then he had to go and ruin it. Well, it had been Jack's fault, but by then it was already inevitable that one or the other of them would have to do something wrong that couldn't be put right again. To put a torch to that tapestry and burn it to ashes.

"Silver to inferno," Jack had said out loud, reading from the inscription on the plinth of a missing statue, as if Garian had been stalling because he had forgotten, not because he didn't want to say something out loud that would instantly persuade his girlfriend to set herself on fire. Christ, but that bird was dumb sometimes...

Garian tried to say something, to turn his back on her so he could hide the fire scroll that he had given to Jack to hold in his talons while they read it, because he had no idea what to do with it at the time. She was faster than Garian. She had already grabbed the scroll and was reading from it. The flames were already engulfing her.

Even if he could have stopped her by that point, all it would have done was leave them both with no way of winning the battle. Being murdered by an insane prison warden wasn't his idea of the perfect end to a date. At least they would have one more chance to speak to each other before she was consumed entirely by the flames. They could share a final, burning kiss of passion.

It wasn't really that much of a compensation. And, as they left on the boat, he still blamed Jack. He refused to speak to the bird that night, even when he went down into his cabin to get some sleep before the boat pulled into the harbour again...


	3. And Suddenly The Dream Stopped Making Sense

Garian didn't see her the entire time he was there. This is what told him that something was very wrong. 

She had been in all the dreams - heck, they had all been *about* her. The dreams had all been very lucid and very detailed. With the sleep problems you developed when you had gone through the kind of things Garian had, it was a miracle when you got a night's sleep, never mind dreams you remember, apart from the ones where you lived the nightmares over and over again. Garian didn't think people, even people whose jobs weren't entirely about killing people, normally had dreams like that. Then, to see the events in the dreams unfold before his eyes down to the last detail - apart from one glaring omission that was too specific to be an error - could not have been co-incidence any more.

It wasn't that there were no signs that she existed at all. She had clearly been on the Island recently. A lot of the prisoners on the island had been talking about her, letting slip when bribed that they had seen her, here and there, appearing from nowhere and then vanishing with the wind. And there had been the roses. The roses had been a prominent feature of his dreams too. He could remember their smell, and when he woke up (he was almost entirely sure he had woken up) to find a real blue rose pressed into the dust cover of his Bounty Hunter's Journal, it had been their smell that unlocked the rest of the memories. Then someone had thrown a bunch of blue roses at him, distracting him at the last second before he murdered a small boy in the same way that he once killed his business partner in the heat of battle, mistaking him for Bilan because he was drunk and he had lost sight of Bilan, and when you lost sight of Bilan for even five seconds, it meant that any living thing you saw could be Bilan, even a small child or your best friend. 

After seeing the roses, he didn't have any communication with her again. He was probably lucky he had turned up at the right time to get the roses at all. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he hadn't.

Other things happened to take his mind off the fact that something was missing. He went through Death Valley, found an illegal mining operation, got way too involved with prison politics and organised crime until he was disgusted with everyone involved and, most importantly, he had found and killed Bilan. The politics was still happening and the Warden insisted he still be involved, but to be honest with himself, he didn't really care any more. Both sides were as bad as each other, he had done what he came to the island to do, there was no paycheckin his immediate future, nothing he could do or say would cause a boat to appear in the harbour any day this year and there was something much more important he had to investigate.

The evidence didn't quite add up right.

The girl had been seen on the Island before Bilan, in Death Valley. More importantly, she had been seen leaving the Island - she was discussing it over her radio to what had been identified as the Lavian Government, then someone had seen a Lavian craft briefly emerge from underwater, then point away from the Island and submerge again. A few seconds later, Bruno was seen heading towards Death Valley. He wasn't seen leaving until a lot later than he should have, for a business deal where the other person didn't turn up, and he was acting strangely.

It didn't make sense for Kay not to be on the Island, when she had been the one to throw the roses. It had never made sense for her not to be there, for the two of them not to meet. So Garian did the only thing that made sense; he went back to Death Valley to look for more evidence.

As soon as he stepped into Death Valley, he had been forced to fight a pack of green lizard things. He recognised Bilan clones when he saw them, and he guessed Drizzit had been caught by Bilan at some point. It was odd, as he could have sworn Drizzit went in the opposite direction to Bilan. They were attacking him on sight, so he killed them. 

Then he saw her, at the other end of a precarious wooden platform in the middle of the deadly swamp. Acidic green blood dripped from the blades of her ninja knives. As she recovered from her fighting stance and stood up, she noticed him and looked straight into his eyes. They had never met before but they recognised each other as though they had known each other all their lives. He couldn't believe he had forgotten this scene. It had been the most vivid of the dreams, even though he couldn't remember where it was supposed to fit in with the others.

He ran across the platform and she met him halfway. He gathered her into a tight embrace and leant forwards for a kiss...

The sharp pain brought with it a sudden clarity, wrenching him from all thoughts of dreams: beautiful women, even ninja women, didn't have that bloodthirsty a look in their eyes, they couldn't adopt that feral a posture or lick acidic blood from a weapon, they couldn't make noises like that and their image didn't flicker for a brief second every few minutes, showing another identity underneath. 

As he was thrown off the platform into the swamp, his life already fading away, his last thought was; it didn't make any sense. 

There couldn't be more than one Bilan. He had been tracking Bilan for long enough to know that there was only one of him. There couldn't be two Kays either. Kay was just a person, and the same person couldn't exist more than once. 

Or maybe he was still dreaming, and he would wake up in a few second's time on a boat heading towards a prison island... 


	4. Next Time It Will Be Different

Garian had noticed that his relationship was rather stuck in a rut lately, so he decided to try doing things differently the next time he had a chance. After all, when you always ended up doing the same things, over and over again, even though you knew they weren't working, you never got anything done. Of course, it was a difficult habit to break out of. Once you started doing things in exactly the same way a certain number of times, it got so that you couldn't help yourself - you couldn't even conceive of another way that it could be done.

It doesn't help matters when you're in an infinite time loop centred around the same two days, a closed circle of probability where there are only three possible ways your destiny can go, and where everything that happens is determined by five minutes of running around a boat in a state of panic.

Normally Garian wouldn't even bother looking at random techno-babble written in his journal. He would just assume that Jack was writing in his journal without his permission again, or Kaiser had stolen it, or both of them were in it together in the avian world domination conspiracy that he knew damn well existed. However, the notes were in his handwriting, he definitely didn't remember writing them and they made a disturbing amount of sense, based on the dreams he'd been having, the dreams that were too close to memories, and the nagging feeling of doubt that lurked underneath all of it and kept creeping into his brain. That, and the first prediction about the boat and the panic was already happening. The first sentence in the diary had said, 'Above all other priorities, no matter how urgent, this is the most immediate: you MUST get to the cabin in under four minutes'. Reading and thinking on the run wasn't easy, especially when Musashi had broken out and was trying to kill you because of something you'd already messed up along the way, so he just followed the instructions and then read the rest when he got to the Island.

It hadn't been Garian's first attempt. He had been experimenting for a while now, pushing at different walls of his causal prison to see if he could move anything even a little. It looked as though he had been given plenty of time; there were at least a year's worth of notes already. He had already determined that most things were fixed, literally couldn't be changed at all. For instance, he couldn't choose not to arrive at the Island. He had even tried dying on the boat. One of the experiments he had tried, deliberately dying to Bilan after he had locked himself in the Captain's Cabin with his enemy, had caused him to 'relive events from past visits to the Island in previous iterations of the time loop in a kind of purgatory while he awaited immediate reincarnation. Note to self: don't do this EVER again, it hurts like hell'. 

He had also determined that it had to be a major event in his life that was changed, otherwise it wouldn't have enough knock-on effects to make a difference to the overall path that his life took. The trick is to make sure it was something that would break destiny, would make it so that it was logically impossible for the course of fate to continue as it had been doing, but not something so destructive that it would kill him permanently or throw him into an even smaller infinite loop. 'Nudge it just a little and you run out of time. Nudge it too much and you crash and burn. You should practice on the arcade machine I built you in my spare time.' How long had this been going on, exactly?

The inspiration had come from her again. When he tried to think of major events in his life, all he could think about any more was her. Meeting her, having to part with her again, saving her life, watching her die; the only thing he looked forward to was his smile, the only thing he remembered from all his dreams was what she had been doing in them. He had just met Kay again in the torture chamber, had rescued her and broken them both out. 

'The interesting thing about the escape through Deadman's Castle is that Drizzit can be safely left to die at any time without any undue effects,' he read as he walked down the corridor, chair hoisted above his head on one shoulder (He was getting good at this) and journal in the other hand, hoping he didn't walk into any more low-hanging electrified fences, 'It will cause some significant differences in the short term but it does not take long before the loop reasserts itself. Hopeful, but we will need something more dramatic and permanent.' 

If he was late, he got to carry around a reptilian convict who smelled like a sewage works. If he was on time, he got to carry the girl of his dreams, strapped to a chair. Things really did go better for him if he could just turn up on time once in a while.

"Hey, Kay," he said suddenly, gazing up at her. She looked down, startled at the sudden serious tone to his voice when she had mostly been calling him a filthy Rajeen dog and he had been threatening to charge her double, "Do you ever think that it would be nice to have another life?"

"Do you really mean that? It is just what I was thinking... how could you possibly..."

"Not just another life sentence. Another life," he clarified, "Kay, do you believe that I'll meet you in my dreams, wherever we end up and whatever happens to us there?"

"I have dreams too... come to think of it... that's where I saw you before... I've been dreaming of you for a long time now. Why is that?"

"Then it'll be okay in the end," he said, then added, "Sorry about this."

"Sorry about wha..." she said, before he threw her, chair and all, off the forty foot drop from the top floor to the basement of Deadman's Castle. Nobody could see what he had done except Vancane, who presumably didn't care. He didn't see her hit the bottom but he knew, long before Jack flew back up to tell him the bad news. Somehow, he just knew. Things were finally going to be different this time.

Now, he just needed to decide what the hell he was going to tell her sister...


	5. He Wondered If She Had Known All Along

“I have a message from him,” she had said, “Let's meet in our dreams.”

She already knew. He wondered if she had known all along since the beginning. Maybe she had even known before him. Communication between them was terrible. It was probably why their relationship never really lasted. They never had a chance to sit and talk problems over between them. It wasn't really either of their fault; neither of them could spare four minutes without something terrible happening to them as a result. Even now, Jailer's Island was literally falling apart around him, just because one of them had the temerity to do something slightly different from usual.

She had never once given any indication before now that she had even noticed anything out of the ordinary in her life. He suspected that Tracy had made her promise she wouldn't tell him, as part of some scheme of hers to finally get the two of them together permanently. If Kay had known all along, it would make sense that her sister had been telling her; Tracy, the ninja girl who had prophetic visions of the future, even after destiny itself stopped working. Jack always joked that Garian secretly liked Kay's sister better. Yet another thing birds didn't understand: bounty hunters don't keep watching the people they like the most. They watch the people they trust the least. Garian wasn't going to take his eyes off Tracy.

'Do not mess with Tracy,' the final entry in the journal said, 'There is a fine line between breaking free of the cycle of reincarnation and falling off the bottom of it. Tracy is that fine line. She is the God of the Underworld and she can end you permanently. You must never, ever give her reason to judge you and find you guilty. I'm finally going to be free, but it isn't worth it. Please don't follow me. I am broken, but maybe I've finally caused enough damage to make a hole large enough for someone else to fit through.'

As Garian watched Tracy, he did not see a God of the Underworld. He saw a girl who was worried about her sister even though she herself looked about to collapse from hunger and exhaustion. He saw a girl with shadows in her eyes, shadows of the things that haunted her because she could not help but stare into the abyss that stared back at her. Knowing too much about this Island did that to you, but if you didn't know what was happening, you would never get out. It didn't make you a demon incarnate.

On the other hand, she was here now, and the blue roses had stopped coming. Putting an extra blue rose in his journal each time, to mark how many iterations had passed, was something of a routine. They were the only things that carried over between iterations. But since the last experiment, they had all disappeared. And there hadn't been any blue roses the last time Garian walked towards the gates of Deadman's Prison. 

Garian watched him leave with Jack on one submarine while the girls left together on the other. If I fail this time, he thought, the next iteration is gonna be all kinds of interesting. He couldn't help but feel happy for the other one, that he had achieved a victory of sorts. Tracy was still staring right at his hiding spot. He wasn't sure if she knew he was there but couldn't quite spot him, or if she had spotted him and didn't want to say anything. There weren't many good places left to hide on the Island. Carbon Garian had almost found him once or twice but Garian had been able to hang back and avoid him each time. He had been wrong about lateness. When you were late, you could often hang back and avoid the really bad things. Jack was another matter. There was only one place on the entire Island where he could hide from Jack.

The stage was collapsing under his feet and sinking into the ice-cold green water beneath him, so he pushed his way through the final curtain and broke into a run, back up the broken stairs and through the crumbling gates and archways into the sinking prison.

'Even after I serve my time, I'd love to live here forever,' the prisoner in JJ City had said as he gazed up at the sky through the hatch in the ceiling. There had been six stars in a row in the sky that night. He hadn't really thought about it at the time. He had always thought escape had been the answer, but if so, who had gone to so much trouble to bring him here in the first place? He had been running the wrong way. Chasing the wrong Lady.

He kept on running, not caring what was beneath his feet other than that it was still Jailer's Island soil, until he was running for the sake of it, to feel motion, to see the world around him and hear its song, to fill his senses with nothing else but the Island's voice, like an exile coming home for the first time. Then he realised that time had stopped. Not in a 'frozen for all eternity' way, but in the way that machines wound down to a stop when there was no need for them any more. As though time itself had finished counting down. It was a silence, not of the grave, but of an audience awaiting the finale, eager not to miss a single moment of it. Destiny had come to the finish, finally, leaving only the last moment of time, the single event of joyous completeness.

Everyone on the Island, alive or dead, here, arriving or departing, filed up to the peak of Mount Mejourna in a single procession, a river of souls. They stopped just before the cliff edge and waited. Six stars shone in the sky, like jewels of pure Bilanium. Bilan had come here to transcend, to trigger his final evolution; Garian finally realised that it hadn't just been Bilan. Bilan had just been the first. And, considering how many people were at some point possessed by Bilan, he would probably be the last.

As she sang her final song, her final message to them appeared in the stars and everyone listened. It thanked everyone involved in the project on Jailer's Island for their co-operation. It apologised for keeping them waiting for so long. It had been a great success. 

Maybe she could apply it on a larger scale some time.


End file.
